Strike while Hadoop analytics apps are hot

Analytics software tipped to snowball answers to big-data business questions

Software that is part of the Hadoop-MapReduce business analytics ecosystem is likely to sell well from today until at least 2016, according to a report from IDC.

IDC has completed its first global report on the category, indicating the worldwide Hadoop-MapReduce ecosystem software market was worth $77m (£47.7m) in 2011 and is on track to grow to $812.8m by 2016 – a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 60.2 per cent.

Carl Olofson, programme vice president for information management software research at IDC, said the big-data management software is capable of kick-starting a range of projects and problem solving for business customers.

"Hadoop and MapReduce are taking the software world by storm, inspiring a wide range of projects that collect both structured and unstructured data and producing output that may be used to answer a single question; serve as the foundation for a range of other questions, queries, or searches; or be loaded into a data warehouse for more systematic and repeatable query," Olofson said in a press statement.

The Hadoop and MapReduce market would probably develop similarly to the market for the diverse and broad-based Linux distribution ecosystem, according to IDC.

Hardware vendors, applications vendors, developers, and deployers of products that support or work within the Hadoop and MapReduce ecosystem are best placed to benefit from the market's growth over the next 10 years, the analyst's statement said.

IDC believes one of the key drivers is the increasing availability of interactional, attitudinal and behavioral data from such sources as social media and other web-based applications. There is more desire now to mine such data for its full value.

However, market expansion may be inhibited by competition between open-source vendors and "closed-source" counterparts, which may force licence fees down, IDC added.